A Clear Victor!

I'm a fan of smart, funny, engaging, gripping, entertaining and, above all, well written television and living in the UK I get the opportunity to sate my appetites at many a table. Aunty Beeb supplies me with not one but four outlets of creative genius from the Doctor on One, through Two's charming Mr Paxman, Three's incredible Being Human all the way to BBC Four, the stomping ground of the ever impeccable Mr Stephen Fry. Similarly Channel 4 supplies a veritable televisual feast through it's many outlets... they even let Charlie Brooker make a fictional prime minister fuck a pig. Even good old Five supplies my habit in the form of the superb Five US. Ass to all this the plethora of digital delights as well as the heady joy of my Sky subscription and I am awash with televisual wonder. In point-of-fact everyone in British TV industry is doing a tremendous job, consider my hat doffed in your direction... 

Bravo sirs, bravo indeed.

...well except ITV. Long ago ITV gave up any pretence and descended into a nightmarish freak-show. I was seriously considering get the listings for today's excretia but I'm not going to bother it's easy to guess what's on the menu...

The disappearance of this logo marks the exact point ITV stopped giving a fuck.

• 06:00-10:00 Good Morning from the Uncanny Valley. A circus of the benile hosted by a parade of not quiet human present-o-bots and Lorraine Kelly
• 10:00-12:00 TV to hat humanity to. A series of talk-shows where the worst specimens of a species you already felt uncomfortable being part of are grabbed from the streets of Dagenham and corralled into subhuman screeching matches by Jeremy Kyle or similar.
• 12:00-13:00 Idle gossip disguised as news.
• 13:00-14:00 Yet more idle gossip this time from a bunch of thoroughly objectionable cunts who need to have a power-tool shove into their respective uteri.
• 14:00-15:00 A psychic makes things up at 'celebrities' who are such non-entities you'd have trouble pulling them out of a line-up minutes after they'd raped you, which this being ITV they might.
• 15:00-18:00 Attempting, and failing, to capture children’s attention span long enough to sell them food and toys that will eventually kill them. They might as well call CITV the Kiddy- Smack-Push-A-Thon.
• 18:00-19:00 More 'news' for dimwits.
• 19:00-22:00 Corrie and some bullshit show where they you behind the scenes of whatever their latest circus of reality freaks happens to be.
• 22:00-23:00 Hey look it's the only bit of news that might not be shit, oh no, someone 'famous' has had a problem and is pretending it's a social issue so they champion it and repair a recent PR disaster.
• 23:00-00:00 Jordan or Peter Andre being a twat.
• 00:00-06:00 Cunts in a jungle... I'd prefer it if they just showed Teletext like back in the nineties.

There was a time when this was the best thing my TV did.

Given that I was particularly surprised to learn that there was going to be something on ITV that I wanted to watch...

No... watching this with adverts merely high-lights how nightmarish the world we live in is.

Now for those of you who aren't entirely clear on my feelings towards lovely, lovely Adele, I'll clarify. Adele's voice is one of the greatest things to happen to music in years, it is one of the greatest wonders of the modern age. In addition to that every time I see her being interviewed she seems funny, smart and down-to-earth. It doesn't hurt matters that she also happens to be absolutely fucking stunning.

Pictured: A woman who could hunt down and eat Kate Moss and still have the energy to shag.

I'm listening to 21 as I write this, it's not planned it's just how I spend about 10% of my time. All of these combined means I was really looking forward to watching Adele's acceptance speech at the Brits, her victory being a foregone conclusion to anyone with fully functioning set of ears. Some of you probably get where all of this is going. Here's Adele's acceptance speech from the Brits...

… 33 seconds, that's how much time she was given to express what was clearly going to be a heartfelt and speech and then ITV made James Corden hate himself by cutting her off. What was the reason for this. To cut to the news. The lead story of which would clearly have been Adele winning at the Brits. They knew they had a time limit and they knew that Adele was going to be greeted by rapturous applause why not fucking move things along earlier. Cut a bit of Blurs set... or in fact just about anything else. Well Done ITV you've made me choose between you and Adele... smart fucking move, whilst Adele just gave ITV the finger making me fall in love with her even more... which I didn't even think was possible at this point.

eddie <where is ITV HQ I want to set it on fire>

Being Awesome; Part 1

So we once again find ourselves at the beginning of a new collection of months, I'm led to understand that there will in fact be the usual twelve even if the Mayans were correct... although I doubt the predictive ability of any civilisation that has ceased to exist.

They started building this is 1400 and left by 1500... seems
like a waste of time for people who can see the future.

However picking holes in what will be, approximately, my ninth apocalypse is a blog for another day... probably the day after it fails to happen. Instead of focussing on the distant future, or lack thereof, I'd like to focus on the now. It is traditional around this time of year to make various sweeping statements about the things about ourselves that we don't like. “I've always hated my life, but not enough to do anything about it prior to an arbitrary date change.” Now I'm not against making positive changes to ones life if you are worried about your health, social life or the amount of Adele you're listening to then by all means try and fix it.

"What's wrong with listening to '21' on loop for 5 hours?"

Also the beginning of a New Year is actually a fairly reasonable time to make these changes... not because of any real importance of the date but rather because the importance that we've invested in it makes the two months before a non-stop round of preparation and parties. In fact I have only one problem with New Years Resolutions... you made the wrong ones.

Shocking, isn't it.

Everyone's life is different and as such everyone has different goals and things they wish to achieve, right? Well, no, actually. There is a single resolution that everyone should make, it will improve your life, the lives of those around you and the world in general.

Be More Awesome.

That's it. Seems simple right. Look every single resolution ever made ever has been working towards this goal. No-one has ever made a resolution to make their life actively worse. Now I understand that some of you have probably made specific resolutions that work towards a very clear goal and the vagueness of this approach may not ring true for you. So let's imagine that you've decided to lose say 5lbs a month, don't shoot for more than that it's pretty dangerous, it all goes well and you end up at your ideal weight around the middle of the year. Well done unfortunately you're still a cunt.

Does this even really need a caption?

I'm sorry were you labouring under the impression that other than a little extra weight you were perfect. Sorry to shatter that illusion. Human beings are by definition not perfect, you will not attain perfection by fixing your flaws. However I've met plenty of awesome people... that's an achievable goal. It's also more pervasive. It affects literally everything you ever say or do, before every action you take just think whether or not it's awesome or not... you're aiming at anything between neutral and awesome. How will this help you lose weight, quit smoking or stop beating your children? Simple, none of the activities that you want to halt fall under the auspices of being awesome.

Just imagine Neil Patrick Harris is judging everything you do

It's only the second day of the year, I've already started blogging again, quit smoking cut back on the drinking and looked into taking archery lessons. I'll be learning to drive and learning another language... probably sign and joining the gym... and going to it, throwing money away on something you don't use is not awesome. Now all I need to do is kick my Adele addiction and this will be a good year.

If loving Adele is wrong then I don't want to be right

I'm going to try to make my first post of each week, usually Sunday, an update on this philosophy and how it's working out to prove that it's easy to be awesome.

eddie <slightly more awesome today than yesterday>